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A Year of Jewish Ethics #6: Ownership

In chapter 23 of Bereshit Sarah dies and in order to bury her, Avraham makes his first purchase of land. Burial is such an important mitzvah, and it’s important that a mitzvah becomes the context for the first purchase recorded in the Torah. What does this teach us about a Jewish ethic of ownership?

Avraham wants to buy from the Hittites M’arat Hamachpelah, the cave of Machpelah. Their leader, Ephron, wants to gift it to him, or perhaps only to give him the use of it. But Avraham wants to own it. So they go back and forth about whether it’s a gift or a purchase, until they agree on a price and make the deal.

Many people are critical of Avraham’s focus on this business at a time of mourning. But I think it’s worth considering nonetheless what the story teaches us about the ethical significance of ownership.

In modern America, we say “A man’s home is his castle.” Think about what this conveys about our culture. Ownership in the dominant American view is bound up primarily with individuality and individual control. That’s the typical starting point – owning creates an absolute individual right, and to deviate from that requires a special justification.

For Avraham, the starting point is different. Avraham has been a wanderer, and while he owns herds and has been very prosperous and never in need, only very late in life does he turns to consider ownership of land for the first time.

For Avraham ownership of the cave is grounded first and foremost in a purpose. There is an immediate purpose, which is a mitzvah he needs to do. He needs the cave to bury Sarah. Avraham also intends for this place to endure beyond his own life, as a physical symbol of his family legacy, which is the story of a covenant that is young at the moment but will unfold over generations. God has promised a mission for his descendants that will take place in this land, and Avraham wants to leave his descendants something connected to that which is theirs undisputedly.

Avraham’s purposes for owning the cave define what he can and can’t do there. He can’t use it to build a separate settlement for himself apart from the Hittites, or a fortification.

Second, for Avraham owning the cave is about defining a relationship between him and the people around him. Avraham has been a transient in this city of Chevron, coming and going, and the Hittites and he don’t necessarily know each other that well. So this acquisition is a jump-start toward an enduring relationship. At its best, doing business with someone is the easiest way to begin to develop trust. In the context of a very specific acquisition transaction, it’s easy to define what honesty and integrity are. If done well, exchanging ownership is an easy win, a deposit on a positive relationship. It’s a moment of equality, and then the boundaries around what’s mine and yours give us a way over time to respect each other’s individuality. Definition helps us see each other as who we are, to relate to each other specifically.

So in this story, ownership serves purpose and relationship. Within those come individuality and the prerogatives of ownership.

This is the ideal. Obviously owning is often not done well. Soon in the Torah Yaakov will purchase Esav’s birthright, but he will do it by taking advantage of someone who is weary and hungry. Modern examples of this are everywhere, including in the contemporary city of Chevron in Eretz Yisrael, and these realities lead some to a critique of ownership all together.

Which is why it’s important to define a Jewish ethic of ownership. Ownership is everywhere in our daily life and our social structure. It pervades our consciousness and our metaphors and our language. To push against the modern language of ownership we need an alternative. In the Torah, that alternative begins with Avraham and the Hittites, and the ownership of M’arat Hamachpelah.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #5: The Binding of Yitzchak

 

It’s impossible to talk about Jewish ethics and the book of Bereshit without addressing the story of the binding of Isaac, Akedat Yitzchak or simply the Akedah (found in Genesis 22:1-19). Avraham hears a call from the Divine to take his son to the top of a mountain and offer him as an offering. Avraham packs them up early in the morning and they travel for two days, and on the third day proceeds almost in slow motion toward this terrible act. Ultimately a messenger from the Divine speaks to Avraham and stops him.

There are so many ways to interpret the message of this story, but for Jewish ethics I want to follow a tradition in the midrash where God never wants Avraham to make this sacrifice, and Avraham knows this even though he is not sure how exactly it will play out.

So the ethical principle is that God never wants us to set aside our responsibilities for human life, ever, even when how to live up to that is complicated. No one’s death is good for a cause, no matter how good the cause. No one’s death and no group’s death can be the purpose of a cause, obviously, and just being willing to kill can never be the way you ask someone to show how devoted they are to a good cause. If you think that God’s will or some cause is so high that it overrides the value of a human life without a thought, you are always wrong.

So why doesn’t Avraham just say to God right off – “Good test – I get it, this is a command I should not obey even from you”?

I follow a way of seeing this story taught by a Chasidic rebbe known as the Izhbitzer. He sees the Akedah as a question Avraham asks himself after he has achieved some serenity and prosperity in his life. The Izhbitzer imagines Avraham saying to himself: How do I know what my own motivations are? How do I am not serving God only because things are easy?

So I imagine Avraham saying to himself: I say I have learned the principle of Tzelem Elohim, of the image of God manifest in every person. But am I really committed to it? Do I always stand up for it?

What if the only way to protect someone I care about puts someone else at risk? What if now that I am old, the only way to protect our legacy is for my child to fight for it, to risk his life for my ideals, to kill those who threaten it or threaten us if he has no other choice? What if he doesn’t know yet how to weep at the loss of life that might come from his justifiable acts, the way I hope I do? What if my pursuit of justice has blinded me to someone else’s life?

In this line of thinking, the Akedah isn’t something that happened, a demand from God, but an exploration within Avraham’s own soul. He makes himself live with the hardest dilemmas that test his commitment to Tzelem Elohim and human life. Because he does not delude himself that these dilemmas are easy.

So we have to commit and recommit to the absolute value of human life. Sometimes how to do that is clear. Sometimes it’s not, and in those cases, such as a just war fought justly, we still have to recognize that the deaths are not for God, or for the cause, and make sure at the very least that we don’t turn away.

The big idea is that God despises human sacrifice. We think we know this, and we have to continue to ask what it really means.

College: Piaget, the Soviets, and the Last of Theory-Driven Psych for the Term

I'm much more interested now than I was back freshman year in the philosophy of language and communication. Not that I am that well-versed now, beyond the literary theory I got into for a time both for teaching literature and thinking about Tanakh (Bible). In that light, I'm noticing in my notes about Piaget where he pulled up short of his project of using cognitive development as a window into what "knowing" is. Some critics have said that he didn't account for language, and I think this means two things. One is that he didn't apply his own very rich and texture stage and substage concepts to the experience of language itself. Language was just one part of the evidence of how a person thinks, not a (semi-?)unique realm of experience in itself. Also he didn't take a stand on whether language drives cognitive development or vice versa, whether language shapes cognition. The notes say that Piaget remained committed to the idea that thought is a motivation for behavior. People think in order to restore themselves to equilibrium, and in that sense development is furthered by a human need for one's cognitions about the self and the world to make sense. On the other hand, at least one critic pointed to adolescence as a period when thought is itself enlisted in service of being more self-centered and in that sense less "formal" than Piaget, or Kohlberg after him, would posit.

Still, what delights me about Piaget is what he did observe, the texture he did provide about one aspect of development. That's much more to me than what he didn't explain or couldn't coherently encompass within his theory.

I read over a couple lectures about the Soviet developmental psychologists, and the project is interesting even if the psychology itself less so. I think this was my first encounter with the notion that there is no real objective standpoing from which to do science. So the Soviets made that a virtue, and adopted Marxist goals -- the new socialist man, a whole and inner-driven ciitzen -- and Marxian analysis -- ideas like the dialectic, meaning sudden change within the individual on the analogy of Marxian class revolution, when the current psychological equilibrium could not hold for a person. There seems to be some belief in social engineering, the ability of a socialist society to help a person grow toward a normative goal, rather than a universal human maturation pattern. I think in some cases, the Soviet psychologists were more humanistic or at least more humane than the Soviet intellectual system as a whole.

With this the course is going to turn away from organizing theories, to stages of life. I really loved at the time how Professor Demick structured the class -- giving us the best of theory and the best of empirical work.

College: Piaget

Yes, I literally just wrote about the prior notes and theory minutes ago!

I've always loved Piaget, even after all the critiques of the narrowness of his focus and of his research base. I rely on him all the time. Looking at the notes, I see immediately two things. One that I forgot, which is that part of what motivated Piaget was a desire to put epistemology on a scientific basis. He thought that exploring how we develop thinking would help clarify what thought actually is. The other thing I love is just how much careful observation there is. Even the sensory-motor stage, which seems like completely pre-cognitive, has so much going on and wiring up, so many building blocks being put actively into place by a baby. I loved reading the specifics of the phases within the phase. This is the first theory I learned that had really a disciplined cluster of observations at its center. I remember going for Thanksgiving break that year to visit Uncle Morris' and Aunt Bert's family and seeing a baby after learning this, and all of a sudden I could see not just a randomly moving blob but all of these specific things! Piaget considered them to be active efforts, not just predetermined maturations, even though we almost all do them.

Certainly it's been helpful to my own epistemology to be able to see the difference between concrete and abstract thinking in teens and preteens (and adults, truthfully), and not to confuse them just because it's all communicated eventually in words. I guess it's also distressing and hard for me that not everyone gets to that "formal operations" stage, which even Piaget values as the desired "good" end point.

I thought it was interesting that Piaget thought that despite the child-driven-ness of how development works, society's intentions or teaching make only a marginal impact on individuals' pace of development. At most opportunities for disequilibrium can be provided and if the child is capable of responding or needs to, they will. This showed up later as an issue in my senior thesis, about the role of teaching in child-centered educational theories.

 

College: Organismic-Developmental Theory

I guess I'll say it was inevitable I'd fall behind but I am determined to catch up well before the "semester" ends. Fortunately, when I was in college reading period was after winter break...

Heinz Werner's organismic-developmental theory seems like something I used to understand and now can't quite piece together. I'm pretty sure it was the school of thought in which Professor Demick was situated, and I seem to remember it holding together in a certain way that I've lost but made a lot of sense at the time.

Two things that interested me in the notes -- First, the idea that we experience reality in three ways. We have an experience of ourselves, an experience of the environment, and an experience of self-within-environment. That's interested as a description of awareness, if that's what they actually meant. I don't remember how that plays out. It's different from saying that a person can be understood from the outside in three ways. The second thing I was struck by was the idea of development as always starting with something new that is diffuse and disorganized, which seems in some sense to be "regression" but is actually the stage anything goes through as it comes into being and then adapts. I think the notes say we are constantly going through this with regard to new things all the time, but overall for most people there is a trend toward organization. This is parr of what's meant by an organismic theory -- people are organisms, and we encounter new things outside and also our capacities pop into play at different stages, and there is a process of accommodating and adapting and then functioning. Those weren't the terms in these notes.

Why I say I used to get it more -- I think what I'm seeing in my notes is a bunch of parts. The idea of the human as an organism -- a whole, whose levels and parts are distinct but all relevant to who the person is; as a part of an environment, and not an isolated entity -- that I got at the time and still get. How this translates into understanding psychological phenomena in a distinct way, either I don't see it or it's obvious and everywhere. The latter might have been the point. You can't just pick one thing about human development and call that the main thing, or even understand the one thing on its own, whether that's social development or cognitive development. Okay, maybe I do still get it?

Gratitude for Being Together in This Country

These are my words from this past Tuesday's Thanksgiving service with the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. Thank you to Pilgrim Congregational Church for hosting us this year!

Let me start my reflection on gratitude for being together in this country with a story about Wolf Landsman, Clarence Stetson, and Eva Castillo. It’s possible I have told this story in an interfaith council setting before, and if so then I am telling it again!

Thanks to my sister Ellen, the family genealogist, I know that in 1893 just a few days after July 4^th, my great-grandfather Wolf Landsman came to the city court in Utica, New York, or as it is known in my family, the Garden of Eden. Grandpa Landsman as my dad calls him was 21, and he had been in this country for only three years. At the courthouse he declared his intent to become a citizen of the United States and renounced all allegiance to his previous sovereign, the czar of Russa. That could not have been a hard thing to do; to be a Jew in the czar’s empire was terrible, and over a few decades about forty percent sought refuge and new possibilities in the United States. The hard thing for Wolf Landsman to do would have been to do write his intentions on a form in English.

So the document Ellen found is completed in the beautiful handwriting of Clarence Stetson, a court clerk. Plus my great-grandfather’s X for a signature. What I know about Mr. Stetson is that he and his family were for at least 80 years and may still be part of the legal, governmental, and civic leadership of Utica. I want to picture him with a fancy hat, but I have no evidence he is related to those Stetsons.

Some Stetson in a recent generation was leader of an architectural design firm working in the city; travel through downtown Utica and its classic buildings will remind you a lot of our own Nashua.

My favorite part of the document is the one place where I am pretty sure there was no way to quite bridge the communication gap between Grandpa Landsman and Mr. Stetson. In the otherwise meticulous penmanship of Mr. Stetson there is the name of the Russian town where my great-grandfather was born. I think all Mr. Stetson could hear was something like Grvkimustck, so it looks like he fudged it. It looks like letters on the form, but I think it’s just a clever piece of art that looks like letters. I’d ask my sister the researcher to make out the city name, but I like my version of the story better.

Two years ago, 129 years later to the month from the date of this document, I talked about this part of my family’s origins in America at an immigration-related gathering of storytelling and affirmation here in Nashua. When I arrived, with my tightly crafted three-minute intro, I learned that everything during the evening would be interpreted into Spanish and from Spanish to English, in real time, so we should speak accordingly with pauses etc. Thank you to the amazing Eva Castillo.

The upshot of which is that the story of my traditional Jewish great-grandfather was told not just in English by a rabbi -- but in a New England, Unitarian Universalist Church, in Spanish.

That is why I am grateful to be together in this country.

In Hebrew the root-word for gratitude is unlike most words in that it has really only a single letter, rather than three. The letter is dalet ד, which makes the sound D as in Judaic and means a door. I have been thinking about why gratitude is a door, whether it’s about opening and going in or opening and going out. Perhaps this is about emerging from one’s own space into the vastness of America, the chaos that could drown out one’s presence and voice, and yet still being found and heard. Perhaps this is about going inside, to a place not only one’s own but a welcoming home that could be any of ours, and sitting around a table for conversation about ultimate issues among many voices, reaching for a highest common denominator, in a conversation made possible in a space like this that is just right.

As the great rabbi Forrest Gump said: I think maybe it’s both... happening at the same time.

Even, or especially, when we strain to make sense of the words between us, to find a handwriting to represent the histories we are passing back and forth. As we translate our thoughts into one another’s languages. Or even when we can’t quite bridge the communication gap, and all we can do together is write the simplest mark, to indicate that one tried to speak and one tried to hear and we got this far so far.

And that is why this, inside this door, this dalet, is America. This is America. We shall repeat that and repeat that, enact it and enact it, because it is true and it will be true. For that -- for you -- I am thankful.

Jewish -- Thanksgiving is Actually in Our Name

These are words I shared in 2022 at the Nashua Area Interfaith Council service right before Thanksgiving.

The first words a Jew is supposed to say upon waking are: Modah Ani or Modeh Ani, which mean “Thankful am I”. Even before we bring ourselves into focus, we are we are taught to center gratitude, and to make being thankful the frame for our existence in the day that is just starting.

That short morning wake-up prayer goes like this in full:

Thankful am I before You
Power alive and enduring
For returning my soul/my breath into me with love
Great is Your faith

Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, also known as the Velveteen Rabbi, says this last line isn’t just acknowledging the Divine faithfulness to us through giving us life. Rather, it’s actually a separate statement about Divine faith in us. God bets on me for the day to come, that I will pay off that faith even though all I have done so far is become aware that I am here. So in the first seconds of the day a Jew is to say: Thank you, here I am, I see that I’m breathing, great is Your faith in me. And then it’s off into the day.

Though Jews talk a lot about the significance of our name Israel, which means wrestler-with-the-Divine, we don’t talk nearly as much about our more common name Jews --  Yehudim, people of Judah. Judah was the fourth son of Leah and Jacob. Leah was the unloved wife, and when the first three sons were born, Leah gave them each names out of her yearning for more love from her husband, and those names did not come true. When the fourth was born she said instead, “This time I thank the Divine.” From the word for “I thank”, odeh, came the name Yehudah or Judah. (Along the way in the rendering of yehudi from Hebrew to Greek to the Europeans languages, the d sound fell away and the y hardened a bit, hence the word “Jew”.)

This thankfulness is more grounded in experience than the first-thing-in-the-morning “Thankful am I.” Leah’s naming-gratitude is gratitude despite, in the face of. But I wouldn’t say it’s only grudging, or through gritted teeth. In Hebrew words are generally built out of roots with three consonants, and often you can hear all three sounds regardless of the form of the word as a noun or verb. But all the many forms of the word for gratitude in Hebrew share only one sound, D -- the middle letter called dalet, which means: a door.

Thankfulness is a door. More specifically, it’s the decision to open a door from this place you are sitting, a place of perhaps not enough love toward you or from you, or not enough peace or not enough justice – open it and then look toward next-door where there is more of those waiting for you, where there are partners and friends and allies. Or open it and look toward an outside expanse of possibility.

Thankfulness is acknowledging that sometimes that door feels closed, or we don’t have faith enough or energy enough to open it – but then we realize we can, and hopefully we do.

Instant gratitude first thing every day, and gratitude in-spite-of as in our very name -- these are two very different ways in which gratitude is meant to be our essence as Jews. May this Thanksgiving help us become more thankful people each and every day.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #4: Are You Responsible for Your Group?

What responsibility does an individual have for the faults of a whole group? In the first part of Bereshit, the book of Genesis, there are at least two stories that touch on this question directly. One is the story of the Flood, the Mabul in Hebrew, and the other is the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah, S’dom v’Amora. Both of these stories are about a places with a pervasive culture of evil.

The Torah describes and portrays S’dom and Amora in a few places as beautiful, ungenerous, and violent. And also spiritually corrupt, which I take to mean that somehow their ideas and practices justify those other evils and perpetuate them. God presents Avraham with the idea that places like this have no hope and should be destroyed. (I will add here that theologically I don’t believe that this is actually how God operates – I treat this as a metaphor or a thought experiment.)

Avraham argues with God that there might be a group of people within the cities who are tzaddikim, which either means they are innocent of the corruption of their place, or that they are actually people of integrity.

Eventually Avraham and God seem to agree on two possibilities. If there are ten people who are tzaddikim, the cities should not be destroyed at all, and if there are fewer, the cities are doomed but those individuals should be able to leave or extricated.

It turns out that is not a group of ten tzaddikim. There is one family who seem to stand relatively apart, the household of Avraham’s nephew Lot, and maybe it’s only Lot himself. They aren’t admirable, particularly, but they are not the worst of the worst, not what we think of when we think of the pervasive evils of S’dom. They are rescued when the cities are destroyed.

Let me suggest a couple possible lessons from the story of S’dom and Amora, knowing that in later teachings in this series I will have other things to add from the Torah and the Talmudic tradition about this question of individual responsibility within a group guilty of terrible things.

One lesson is that an individual is obligated to leave a group that cannot be swayed away from its vileness, if it’s just one or two against everyone. If you stay past a certain point, then you are responsible even if you’re not one of the ringleaders or you don’t agree. Your presence starts to contribute in all kinds of ways anyway – each time you are silent it strengthens the others, for instance.

It's hard to leave -- Lot and his family hesitate, even when the divine messengers who want to pull them out explain that staying means they will not survive the coming fire and brimstone. But that’s the only way they have a chance to remain innocent and not complicit.

Another lesson comes from the counterfactual that Avraham and God articulate, the idea of ten tzaddikim. Jewish tradition links this with the minyan, a quorum of ten adults for communal prayer. Here in the Torah, it’s a group of ten who stand for the idea of a moral community, not just some individuals who are morally courageous.

Such a group creates an enclave where alternative ideas can be shared openly and fleshed out and lived on a small scale, which can show itself as an alternative to the culture of the larger group. Even a minority can stand up together and try to lead the majority in teshuvah, in reflection and a way back, as long as the small group shares a life together and strengthens each other. A single person or family like Noach or Lot can’t do this, nor can just a few people, and they can’t be expected to take responsibility for that.

Even though there was no such small group in S’dom and Amora, the tradition sees Avraham teaching that there could be and if there are ten people then if they don’t leave, they ought to be a deliberate counterculture. It is at least the first half of the Margaret Mead idea: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Changing the world, in the context of something as extreme as S’dom, does not mean changing things completely. But when you are part of such a minyan, you now have the possibility of staying productively, and working on one important thing where the larger group has veered off.

S'dom and Amora, and the Flood, represent the extreme versions of a thought experiment about an evil society and the role of one tzaddik. I’ll come back in other installments with more specifics from the Talmud, about for instance how long a group like this ought to keep at it when the possibilities are better than they were for Lot and for Noach.

What I Wish President Biden Had Put More at the Center

I am pretty sure that from very soon after President Biden was inaugurated, I wrote and/or said that he had one essential mission, one which he was uniquely situated to do. To bring to bear his basic decency and his long experience with so many different types of people and groups in our society, and to bring people back to an American center. Not a set of policy compromises, or an unattainable moderate politics. Just to get to people who had become disillusioned about whether national generosity and decency and education matter, who were doubting the American exceptionalism that makes a country work with tremendous diversity of origins and religions and views about the role of government. To show all those people that they could talk to him and he could listen to them, and that they could talk and listen to each other.

I argued that he should do this not for policy goals, though that might be nice. But to detox the political rhetoric and to enlarge somewhat a political ”center” where people remain divided ideologically but recognize each other as committed Americans who win and lose elections and policy decisions.

We needed President Biden to travel the country in this way from day one in office, because no one else was or has been able to do it. To find partners in communities where most people did not vote for him. Not people who think he and his party are evil threats to their way of life, or who believe that nonwhite immigrants are the paradigm of every threat imaginable to life and prosperity. I mean the people who leaned away from him and the Democrats recently, or who have always been more conservative but still wanted to believe in most of their fellow citizens and a community among the different.

I don’t know how much President Biden could have succeeded. It wouldn’t have yielded him any short-term political benefit. It might well have given us a different Republican president in 2025, one without the hateful and brutal rhetoric and intentions – a President Haley or Rubio.

Yet how could President Biden have thought that this was such a distant second to his policy goals or his use of his initial legislative majorities?. How could he have thought that he was the last candidate standing, in the 2020 primaries and the general election, for any reason other than his unique persona and this mission? He certainly wasn’t nominated or elected because of his total record or his unique policy menu in 2020. He was elected to be not-Trump not in policy terms but civic terms.

Why didn’t he do it? Oh, why?

Maybe he wasn’t physically up to it. Maybe he thought that just being not-Trump, not dominating everything in the media, would leave room for other kinds of air to come in on its own. Maybe he believed what Democrats always believe and is never true in the short-term, that policy achievements even on a massive scale would change people’s feelings.

I don’t know and I don’t especially care. I suppose the signs were even in his inaugural address, where he just asserted the decency of Americans, labeled a fringe and called them a small fringe, and left it at that. He should have instead announced a plan to put himself personally on the line to make his American vision real and visible and palpable.

So this is why I will feel that President Biden has some historic fail on his record, a fail that matters.

I say this with extra regret because I do think that Joe Biden is also the most menschy president of my lifetime. I expect that less and less of presidents, and also need that less and less. I have for a while made myself stop falling in love with presidents. I think there’s a minimum threshold of decency we need in a president, it doesn’t have to be the kind we would want in a friend, and the extra can be traded for effectiveness in other areas. I don’t equate personal goodness with political virtue. But in my lifetime (I was born during the Johnson administration), I don’t think there is anyone who has held the office who was a better human being than Joe Biden has been overall through his time in public life. Obviously there are some terrible blots on this, particularly Anita Hill. Yet to use a cliché, his love not just for America but for Americans are powerful. If you want to get a glimpse into how Joe Biden the man has never waned, take a listen to him on Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief.

I am not one who puts the uniting above the policies, which have direct effects on wellbeing and life. (There was an essay by Michael Walzer in early 2017 that I think articulated the proper relationship between those two things just right.) I just think there was so much more President Biden could have done early in his term especially, to reconstruct some “center” even within the policy horizon he set for himself. He didn’t, and here we are.

Back to College: From Aristotle to Rawls

So back to Justice. I’m trying to see if there’s anything from Aristotle that is in the notes but didn’t stick in my mind back then. One thing I see is the distinction between habits and character. Which is really what distinguishes Aristotle from any old consequentialism. One ought to act the way a virtuous person acts, but the added thing is the deeper seeded virtue, which isn’t captured only in this specific act. Kant says a superficially beneficial act isn’t good unless it is done via the rational will. Aristotle says that a beneficial act doesn’t have enduring moral significance unless it derives from a virtuous character and/or helps develop that character.

Although I became more traditional in my Jewish practice starting maybe a year after this course, I held onto a view of ethics rooted in “the right thing” as something outside the inner process, the character process. Maybe. If you’d have asked me, I still would have been thinking in terms of moral dilemmas and better answers to them, separate from the individual actor. At whatever point Aristotle comes more into my picture, and I may write about that later, I think I asked a kind of consequentialist question, which is whether a “virtuous” person is better because the outcomes of their choices are better or last longer or are more sustained. It’s an external view. I think I still grapple with it – in the grand scheme, is virtue somehow icing on the cake or is it essential to the cake in the first place.

The notes say, and Aristotle says, that the best state is one that cultivates virtue in this way and is the arena for it. How? The notes don’t say, and Aristotle to my recollection asserts this in the Ethics but it’s a desideratum, not a detailed plan. I also see in the notes that virtue action is responsive to the individual case and not only to abstract rules, which makes this all the more difficult.

In section, Benor identified honor as the name of the highest virtue in social life, to go with wisdom which is the highest telos for each individual. So for Aristotle a state is based on cultivating honor as well as wisdom, and modeled on/cultivates the relationship between people with those virtues. I have a sense of what wisdom is supposed to be in this account but I don’t remember about honor.

Around this time I wrote paper #1, which was a critique of Ayn Rand’s short paper on libertarianism. My approach was to attack Rand from within. Her conception of a right to life, which to her is the only fundamental right and the grounding of the right to property, is undermined when people do not have the means to guarantee their own life. So a minimal state that took from the excess of the wealthy would be justified in the name of the right to life. I got a B-, largely for two reasons. Benor said the right to life for Rand is not the right to be alive, but the right to try to sustain one’s life, no guarantee. That seems right. The other flaw is that I had a squishy definition of society that did not address Rand’s position that society isn’t a thing of moral significance at all.

I like that I swung for the fences. I didn’t do any better job than what I wrote last time Professor Sandel hadn’t done yet offering a critique of libertarian assumptions. I do see in my paper a tiny seed of a Rawslian idea, which is that the wealthy are entitled to their wealth so long as everyone else has a minimum. I know later Milton Friedman is going to say in our readings that market-based social policies are more Rawslian than liberal government solutions, but I didn’t have that yet! Or maybe Rawls’ positions (have to get there) are really obvious.

[I reread the paper assignment to see whether I got what was being asked, and noticed that word “critique.” It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I came across the term “critical theory”, and I think a long time later, long after college, that I got what I think it means. That some theories specialize in clarifying and critiquing other theories, more than generating substantive world-pictures on their own. I think what I did in this paper was a mix, a bit of this and a bit of that. Obviously it was both a short paper and my first of its kind.]

Professor Sandel – I didn’t remember this quite – now set up a debate between Aristotle and Kant. Aristotle doesn’t really put freedom on any definition at the center, and for Kant it’s the main thing. For Aristotle, the highest purpose defines morality, and it is “natural”, and thus in a sense freedom is counter to nature. For Kant, freedom (autonomy) is the one of the few fundamental natural moral laws.

Professor Sandel used this to introduce the distinction between the framework for political society and the substance of morality. The idea of a social contract is what joins these two together – rational actors with different notions of the moral life/the good create a framework that they are obligated to which enables everyone to pursue their own conception of the good. That gets us to John Rawls, who sought a grounding for individual rights that did not rely on any metaphysics at all, particularly not a teleological one or a utilitarian one, which would make individual rights subordinate to the collective or an outside moral absolute.

Locke’s state of nature account is basically utilitarian when it comes to the transition from the state of the nature to civil government, so that doesn’t work, Rawls does away with any such account and instead has a hypothetical situation, which would yield the two principles of liberty and equality (the “difference principle”). Anyone like us who found ourselves in the original position would agree to those principles, and the contract would bind us.

There was a whole lecture about what makes contracts binding, and a key point is that contracts aren’t justified only by their benefits. It’s only by their being freely agreed to for the purpose of mutual benefit that a contract has force. Real contracts are always flawed. But the social contract posited by Rawls is without those flaws. It didn’t happen at a point in time, but it is the only justification possible for our liberal-egalitarian constitution, because that is the only one we would have contracted with each other if we could have made an ideal contract.

Benor in section helped us see that Rawls, which talking abstractly, really presumed both cultural specificity (us) and moderate scarcity, which makes the second principle relevant. I think he made explicit the genius of Rawls, which is to make freedom and equality the product of self-interest and detach them from a substantive view of the good. Even though we might well hold liberty and equality as goods, some of us, that isn’t their justification across society on Rawls’ account. This is the distinction between “right” (the framework) and “good” (morality.).

We spent a ton of time on Rawls, more than we delved into anything so far. I guess Kant was there as an important piece but not really as political philosophy? This issue of the right and the good as separate things, that’s really important and I sure would never have understood those before. I found this a really helpful way to approach egalitarianism as a political position, at the time, because it did not require persuading anyone out of ideas like the value of hard work and individual effort, or into gooey ideas about common humanity.

I did notice in section this idea of the “well-ordered society”, which strikes me as a bit of Aristotle snuck in at the end? Benor says Rawls imagines a society where it’s more than institutions that embody the two principles of justice. It’s where citizens know the principles and actually imagine themselves having chosen them. I don’t know or remember how much Rawls cares about this or whether it’s as necessary to his picture as such a thing was for the Greeks.

For the couple weeks we were steeped in Rawls I really loved it, and I think it stayed with me for a long time as  beautiful (though not on the page – Rawls’ book is so conceptual and repetitive and full of methodological stuff, which is of course important). I think I struggled with the precise definition of economic equality. Rawls holds that unequal starting conditions for people are relevant, but doesn’t define if there is a degree of wealth inequality that is too much. He gives a standard to judge by, which is in real life impossible to assess. This issue was one of the things Professor Sandel pointed out as a question to Rawls. So how at the time did I see this; as a way for me to excuse existing gaps in wealth with just some tweaks, or as the best a theory could do and a marker for something more progressive? This was peak Reagan times. My first paper didn’t reach for a big redistribution; I didn’t have a theory for that.

I’m also impressed how much time Professor Sandel focused on it, when he was clearly a critic of some of its foundations as we would learn soon.